"Big corporations are a permanent part of our economic system"
If you see 'permanent' as the next 150 years or so, yeah I guess. But I hope to live long enough to see "our" economic system evolve into OUR economic system, which will spell the end of multi/trans/meta-national corporations, as they evolve into something more human-scale.
"but the vast majority of them are in it to make money, which they do best by serving the customer's interest."
They generally make the most money ["best"] by NOT serving the customers' interests, through monopolies, corrupt trading, stratifying product lines, hidden vertical integrations, getting subsidy, circumventing or changing regulations, reducing diversity, speculation, arbitrage and consolidation, manipulating perception and mindshare, and creating dependencies. That's where the big bucks are and always have been: exploitation with a smile. Companies can make moderately good profiits and remain within mainstream ethics, but to make a killing... They need people to roll over and wag tails, loyal puppies all.
Some examples: Ethyl Corp's nailing the Canadian taxpayer for hundreds of millions because they aren't allowed to poison us, Rockefellers' secret deals for Standard Oil and Chase M's demand that Mexico eliminate the Zapatistas, Monsanto's intentional genetic pollution tactics, Cargill's control over food distribution; Oh Heck just see for yourself.
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
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Platform Evangelism
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. It seems that a lot of people think that capitalism is 'natural' to humanity, since it has been very successful in developing our capabilities.
Natural is a good choice of words. North Americans are the most propagandized people in the world [5000+ words of advertising/day supported by extensive psych research, vast array of rhetorical images, plus exposure to corporate media] and we don't even like hearing the word capitalist, for the most part, it has a faint whiff of taboo. There has been a couple of hundred years of development in the 'naturalization' of capitalism, using everything from some pretty crank science to curriculum to the active squashing of real alternatives. In order to naturalize an idea/practise you have to make it 'like water to a fish'--inevitable and nigh unnoticeable. Once that is done, contradictions and paradigmatic problems are obscured fairly easily. This is the foundation of any ideology (in the political sense).
You are also mostly right about its success in developing capabilities... well, a narrow set of capabilities, I would argue, but it develops them well. In particular, entrepeneurialism ('the french don't even have a word for that' -- G.W.Bush) has been exalted into a near-saintly quality, and I see great emotional and infrastructural support for entrepeneurs, something that monopoly capitalism (read: soviet russia, china, and other so called communist states) doesn't. But the entrepeneurial spirit doesn't necessarily lead to healthy communities and families, or pure research, or amazing art, for instance.
I would also suggest that capitalism is about much more than money/capital as an end. The conglomeration of power and control with the willing participation of its subjects is always the intended end product of ideologies. Which brings us back to the richest man in the world, and by extension, the Bilderbergers. No mistake: in this context, Evangelism IS war.
The whole point of affirmative action [should be] a way to compensate for embedded preferences that are so ingrained that they aren't obvious to people making decisions using them. From this point of view, people need encouragement to consider alternatives from the mainstream monopoly approach, and in the interests of fairness a shove in an alternative direction is needed.
OK, yeah, such systems are often as boneheaded as the problem they purport to solve. But this is the way governments wield power, by fiat. So recommending a marginal product over mainstream products that have expensive representation of their interests is an equalizing move.
I don't approve of nation-states in general, but I do understand why they resort to these options.
Plenty of reasons. First, ecology is way over our heads, and we don't realize what we're doing when we pull a thread out of the tapestry... maybe the whole thing will fall apart, maybe it will just be less interesting. But the precautionary principle should apply, since we don't understand the risks.
Second, cetaceans are also way over our heads. They may have language; dolphins can carry on something like a two-way simultaneous conversation, where two of them in a tank separated by a wall can chat over a speaker and cooperate on a task to achieve a goal -- while simultaneously 'talking' and listening. Dolphin brains are very large, evolutionarily. In other words, they may be intelligent in a way we can identify, and may have compensated for the lack of hands with other means. We Just Don't Know. If they are, are they less important than any human?
Starving humans is not an ecological/industrial fishing issue, since there is more than enough food and money and expertise to feed everyone without denuding the oceans or desertifying the forests (duh) -- it is a political issue. We spend trillions on warfare, when a small portion of that would provide water/food/education/shelter. This profit-and-geopolitically generated poverty is the big eco-crisis--starvation is only a symptom, as is overfishing.
There are other moral/ethical/scientific arguments galore. But human manifest destiny is an empty promise without a sense of ecological responsibility, and history will damn us for it.
I am trying to convert to InDesign; I've been using OS X for a year now and avoiding XPress [ibid ibid ibid].
I'm one of those who refused XPress 4.x migration. I used 3.32 for so many years the key combinations were hard-wired into my fingers, so that I still try them inappropriately in the wrong software before I realize what I'm doing. Likewise I had OS 9 loaded for speed with Keyquencer macros that I haven't replaced in OS X yet, for everything from window zooming to typing out addresses. My fingers want to use them still...
I have some designer friends working on 'antique' hw/sw and making a good living at it, because of speed. As I will claim ad nauseum, the main computing speed bottleneck is between the ears... your P4 or PPC970 just sits there waiting for you unless it's render time etc. Instinctive control of the interface=$peed, above and beyond many of the new 'features' of software.
So it's not just a mental breakdown they face: it's a physical/financial quandary they are looking at.
Wholehearted Agreement with the parent. Lotus Notes is shoved into our laps at work, and it's been a struggle to part out its functionality into the proper parts: Mail.app, Safari/Camino, Address Book (waiting for propr LDAP support, grr), iCal, and other 'business' tools, on my machine. [Not that I'm an Apple Software Fanatic, but they work and fit into the budget.]
L.Notes had a whole wing on the now-MIA Interface Hall of Shame. It reinvents the conventions found on other platforms (it tries to be a platform unto itself) and does so badly; it's buggy, slow, and designed for administration [decent encrypted document database scheme].
Plus, it centralizes, for better or worse, all my information on servers controlled by I.T..
Now I'd love to have a central app that takes feeds from my favourite info management apps, sorts/ranks/prioritizes/interrelates the items for me according to my usage and prefs, and lets me 'zoom in' to a task by switching to the preferred stand-alone app at will. Haystack has only part of the picture, the model is still gather-control, rather than sift-sort-go.
One item I've found intriguing is StickyBrain, a sticky-on-steriods app, by Chronos LC, which takes info in many categories and allows for quick index searching, plus offers system-wide info-archiving services and some alarm and word-processing features. I had the same kind of thing running with BBEdit, a notes directory, and grep, but it was like hammering nails with a wrench.
I want all my info hotlinked to lists of related items, dynamically: make every significant word a keyword, realtime. After all, what are multi-GHz and piles'o'RAM for, anyway, when not rendering?
Where is the line between intellectual and virtual property? If we go down the road of naturalizing the virtual worlds we invent and bring them up to status with 'consensual reality', then do we risk blurring the boundaries and losing ourselves in [nearly] inconsequential realities, bequeathing care of this reality to those enamoured with power?
Funny, this feels real, but perhaps it's just another level in a simulation [albeit a very good one]. Mind you, I do see the occasional unexplainable glitch.
"Despite the availability of pirate copies, The Matrix Reloaded has made more than $363.5m at the box office worldwide so far. "
Piracy: a crucial part of viral marketing.
Pirates have been given a bad rap, historically. History is written by the victors, remember. Many of the pirates from the great sailing age freed slaves and the indentured, set up their own kingless mini-republics and functional anarchies, and would appear more modern to us than their other contemporaries.
"They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment" - D. Defoe
you'll get my old black rotary phone with the real metal bells and indestructible hard shiny plastic and nice neck-cradling handset when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
No electricity? no problem, it still works. Plus, analog has nostalgia value, too!
Maybe there's a cool mod someone's done for old phones like this so that we can convert them to VOIP...
Canada's only real threat of invasion comes from our staunchest ally, across the 'longest undefended border in the world'. During the early 90's, Fort Drum in upstate NY had urban warfare training exercises and deployable hardware that could've seen an occupation of key points in Ottawa [that's the capital of Canada for those of you who studied geography in the USA's public school system] in about 6 hours. I don't know what their deployment of forces along the border is like now, though.
And we all laugh about it, after all, they'd never invade us, right? No one would stand for it, they have no reason to...?
But it's nervous laughter. We remember "54'40" or fight!" and feel the loss of sovereignty through NAFTA and other agreements, as well as the belligerent patriotism that oozes northward with a caustic eye. Some of us are acutely aware of the years of maneuvering around access to our resources, particularly energy and the alarming megaplumbing projects aimed at flowing water south. The latest unapologetically neocolonialist activity in oil regions makes us even more nervous. Now we have a populist and realist movement to give us further liberties over our own bodies by decriminalizing personal use of cannabis and hemp production that is being squashed by the Drug Lords of the Bush Admin, and we feel more anxious about US power over us than the loss of that particular freedom.
This is something we don't talk about publicly much [a political taboo?], but it's a pretty common topic across demographics, once you get a few drinks into people.
However, I don't think that a few students studying virii indicates much about our defense priorities. CSIS, the RCMP, and the military agencies have put a fair proportion of their [relatively limited] resources into exploiting networks as a strategic zone.
The SPoD doesn't exist. I mean, I've seen something where the cursor pointing thingy all of a sudden tries to hypnotize me, but I've read all about that Borg Marketing Trojan Horsewear that tries to convince you that the colourful XP is stable fast and slickable, by taking over programs and turning the cursor pointing thingy to a hypnotist's wheel. So I immediately hit the Apple-Tab key combo to fight the dark side impulses, and the nausea-inducing spinning assault on my staunch macness just goes away!! After awhile I can switch back to my poor 'beleaguered' program and the Borg attack is gone.
There is no Pizza. It is your multitasking that must bend.
OMG. Did someone really moderate the parent 'interesting'? Recovery1 it's obvious you need to get out of Moose Jaw more often. Chinese is a common language in Richmond or Vancouver; go to other parts of Canada and you'll find other common languages. French has entrenched language rights because of RECENT history, really you should crack open that Hisory 11 textbook before you fail.
Your radio host is unlikely to be spouting facts. And since you aren't speaking Cree and wearing buckskin, don't fuss about other settlers adopting local customs. If people ask me what is typical canadian cuisine, I say puffy sweet and sour shrimp, since it's the one culinary consistency you'll find across the nation's small towns, aside from grilled cheese sandwiches.
Oh, and for now ignore cranks who complain about minority rights, Canadian society is still run with a white supremacy understanding despite all the PC rhetoric. Open your eyes, youngster!
Thank you, Sue Clayton, for indirectly pointing out that Hollywood is suffering from creative necrosis.
There are, of course, scientific guidelines behind any art form, such as the Golden Ratio, but this isn't one of them. While I am open to the possibility that there may be some universals in human narrative, I shudder to think that the commodified culture of Hollywood might impose its formulas on us like a mental template. Or is it too late?
As usual, this issue is raised in a way that obscures the relationship between the commodification of life and the pure science.
We can't discuss the ethics of GM humans in anything like a civilized manner, since we can't even look accurately at the massive abuses in the patent systems, the regulatory systems, and corporate responsibility.
Let me throw out a few terms and issues that need to be discussed thoroughly before one can begin to consider the ethical rights of GM humans: - biopiracy - patented bloodlines - patenting of life - consolidation of life sciences capital resources - the precautionary principle - breeding |= Genetically Modified Organisms - Monsanto's campaign of intentional GMO pollution - emergent properties in DNA - food sovereignty and regional food security - the dangerous loss of biodiversity - the dangerous loss of local knowledge - the interpenetration of Monsanto execs and the FDA - the attempt to squash labelling rights - etc.
Unless you have a grasp of at least some of these issues, you can't just gripe about Foaming-at-the-Mouth Envirodweebs chanting Frankenfoods.
Look at what Monsanto is doing to Percy Schmeiser [google him], then tell me that the future of GM humans has nothing to do with present corporate practices.
Wish list item 3 (after PPC970s and 10.3) for summer fun:
An AirPort G4 tablet with 6hrs of battery life, an 11" 1024x768 screen, slim/nimble version of OS X, slot-load cdrw, 20GB/512MB/QuartzExtreme, and brushed metal everything.
Wait, scratch that: roll-out 16x9 organic touch-display, 4TB holo-storage, true voice-recog, 10GB memory sticks, gigabit wireless, fuel-cell powered uptime of 3 weeks between butane refills, and OS XII-- for under $1K.
It's not a question of better or worse engineering; engineers solve problems based on the material conditions at hand. There is tons of space in the new, spread-out N.A. urban environment, making it easy to stick transformers on the side of the road, wherever convenient, in a way that solved all kinds of economic and technical problems relevant only to the N.A. environment. My point was that the unforseen fallout of those decisions affected the ability to move a signal up and down the line. No one made that a design parameter, because who woulda thunk it was an issue!
Re:Just for comparison's sake...
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Genome Surprise
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Aw hell, there go my mod points.
Race is not much more than a way of classifying people based on appearance. It might also hint at a shared cultural background, but not always. But it is still potentially useful.
Well, for sociology nerds, it's important to remember that 'race' as a concept doesn't really exist outside of a discourse of oppressive relationships, since its historical origins as a concept were so bound up in the overdetermining of slavery as a 'natural' practice.
Not that anyone who uses the term is being oppressive. You are right to some degree, that the term is often used as a way of pointing at appearance linked to geographic heritage. But that nasty history is carried along with the word and the way the institutions of the world deal with it. Yes, words like that always have complex meanings.
Anyone who examines the quagmire that is Race Politics in N.A. (which influences the discourse of race throughout the world) has to admit that oppression, repression, taboo, and resistance are not yet dissociated from the concept of race.
As the poet said, "race is a myth, but racism isn't."
The primary difference in the ease of deploying IP over A/C is with the differing electrical infrastructure in NorthAmerica as opposed to the U.K. (and possibly other regions, don't know about that). In N.A. transformers were put all over the place in such a way that it presents a significant problem for getting a clean signal all the way down the line.
The geekiest garden approach is permaculture. This is a systems and pattern-oriented approach to producing food and other agricultural products and I keep wondering why it isn't growing [*groan*] more rapidly as a philosophy.
Reasons for geekiness:
gardening is relational: patterns of planting, systems of flora and fauna
smart gardening is lazy: plant lots of perennials, organize things for ease of access, use no-till methods
weeds and pests are not bugs, but features to be managed
The whole perpetual motion thing really hangs on just how good we get at tapping into the zero point field, which is the energy that's seething away at less than 10^-33 m wavelengths even at zero K. The whole 'enough energy in a cup of tea to boil an ocean' cliche -- if only we can get at it.
Now there's been a fair bit of scoffed at yet strenuously researched scientific endeavour in this area, but all the successes seem to be in the snake oil category, though there are some humble curiosities like John Hutchison's work. Still, we don't understand dick about it: it doesn't really fit into the currently popular physics models, it is beyond the reach of our current instruments, and so any use of it, if it's really there, is either impossible or really dangerous.
Is it sophistry to say that the sun doesn't come up, but the earth spins? Depends on how serious the discussion is.
This is a serious discussion, so if you want 'bullshit' to be a general category, might as well assign it to all media, including the NY Times. There is plenty of analysis of the Times showing how they consistently use propaganda techniques to underreport or bury certain issues, like US Gov't support of [insert totalitarian regime here, plenty to choose from]. A recent example from my own experience: Rumsfeld makes a statement that's reported in the LA Times that they may consider bringing back internment camps; two days later the whole article is gone from the website, not even archived or formally withdrawn (but all the RRSP advice and local crimes articles are still there). Plenty of well documented examples out there in peer-reviewed journals if you want them.
"Bullshit" / Lies / truth are categories that don't really apply to mass media, just to some of the facts they represent. This is why news shows stopped claiming objectivity in the early '80s, and switched to claiming "balance" as what they offer.
You aren't immune from propaganda. North American society is probably the most propagandized region of the world simply by virtue of our media consumption; but, like a fish, we can't see the water. Time to get out and walk!
Umm, show me the content analysis over a 5 year period, wise guy. Let's see a little empiricism behind such allegations. There was lots of that for Pravda; should be easy to produce for al-Jazeera, eh?
Unless you have some expertise, you're just being a jingoist, thanks. Hey, I like open source, want me to set up your linux render farm? Didn't think so.
I work with media theorists, and have respect for the hard work they do. It's real work, not hocus pocus or pure ideology or the kind of 'horseshit' you're offering.
That goes for most of the second-guessing of the media I see going on here. For nerds, there's a lot of uninformed invective about a field that has lots of published research.
Re:AlJazeera DNS and routing tampered with.
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4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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Thanks, that answers my freakin' question. Everyone can go home now, move along, nothing to see here, go read something informative.
Re:It's not hacked, its blocked by american router
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4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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MODERATORS: mod the parent up, someone's actually trying to answer my question... Likewise with other posts that try to investigate the issue with more than conjecture or invective or the obvious/.'ed snark.
Slashdot Mirror
If you see 'permanent' as the next 150 years or so, yeah I guess. But I hope to live long enough to see "our" economic system evolve into OUR economic system, which will spell the end of multi/trans/meta-national corporations, as they evolve into something more human-scale.
"but the vast majority of them are in it to make money, which they do best by serving the customer's interest."
They generally make the most money ["best"] by NOT serving the customers' interests, through monopolies, corrupt trading, stratifying product lines, hidden vertical integrations, getting subsidy, circumventing or changing regulations, reducing diversity, speculation, arbitrage and consolidation, manipulating perception and mindshare, and creating dependencies. That's where the big bucks are and always have been: exploitation with a smile. Companies can make moderately good profiits and remain within mainstream ethics, but to make a killing... They need people to roll over and wag tails, loyal puppies all.
Some examples: Ethyl Corp's nailing the Canadian taxpayer for hundreds of millions because they aren't allowed to poison us, Rockefellers' secret deals for Standard Oil and Chase M's demand that Mexico eliminate the Zapatistas, Monsanto's intentional genetic pollution tactics, Cargill's control over food distribution; Oh Heck just see for yourself.
Natural is a good choice of words. North Americans are the most propagandized people in the world [5000+ words of advertising/day supported by extensive psych research, vast array of rhetorical images, plus exposure to corporate media] and we don't even like hearing the word capitalist, for the most part, it has a faint whiff of taboo. There has been a couple of hundred years of development in the 'naturalization' of capitalism, using everything from some pretty crank science to curriculum to the active squashing of real alternatives. In order to naturalize an idea/practise you have to make it 'like water to a fish'--inevitable and nigh unnoticeable. Once that is done, contradictions and paradigmatic problems are obscured fairly easily. This is the foundation of any ideology (in the political sense).
You are also mostly right about its success in developing capabilities... well, a narrow set of capabilities, I would argue, but it develops them well. In particular, entrepeneurialism ('the french don't even have a word for that' -- G.W.Bush) has been exalted into a near-saintly quality, and I see great emotional and infrastructural support for entrepeneurs, something that monopoly capitalism (read: soviet russia, china, and other so called communist states) doesn't. But the entrepeneurial spirit doesn't necessarily lead to healthy communities and families, or pure research, or amazing art, for instance.
I would also suggest that capitalism is about much more than money/capital as an end. The conglomeration of power and control with the willing participation of its subjects is always the intended end product of ideologies. Which brings us back to the richest man in the world, and by extension, the Bilderbergers. No mistake: in this context, Evangelism IS war.
OK, yeah, such systems are often as boneheaded as the problem they purport to solve. But this is the way governments wield power, by fiat. So recommending a marginal product over mainstream products that have expensive representation of their interests is an equalizing move.
I don't approve of nation-states in general, but I do understand why they resort to these options.
Plenty of reasons. First, ecology is way over our heads, and we don't realize what we're doing when we pull a thread out of the tapestry... maybe the whole thing will fall apart, maybe it will just be less interesting. But the precautionary principle should apply, since we don't understand the risks.
Second, cetaceans are also way over our heads. They may have language; dolphins can carry on something like a two-way simultaneous conversation, where two of them in a tank separated by a wall can chat over a speaker and cooperate on a task to achieve a goal -- while simultaneously 'talking' and listening. Dolphin brains are very large, evolutionarily. In other words, they may be intelligent in a way we can identify, and may have compensated for the lack of hands with other means. We Just Don't Know. If they are, are they less important than any human?
Starving humans is not an ecological/industrial fishing issue, since there is more than enough food and money and expertise to feed everyone without denuding the oceans or desertifying the forests (duh) -- it is a political issue. We spend trillions on warfare, when a small portion of that would provide water/food/education/shelter. This profit-and-geopolitically generated poverty is the big eco-crisis--starvation is only a symptom, as is overfishing.
There are other moral/ethical/scientific arguments galore. But human manifest destiny is an empty promise without a sense of ecological responsibility, and history will damn us for it.
I am trying to convert to InDesign; I've been using OS X for a year now and avoiding XPress [ibid ibid ibid].
I'm one of those who refused XPress 4.x migration. I used 3.32 for so many years the key combinations were hard-wired into my fingers, so that I still try them inappropriately in the wrong software before I realize what I'm doing. Likewise I had OS 9 loaded for speed with Keyquencer macros that I haven't replaced in OS X yet, for everything from window zooming to typing out addresses. My fingers want to use them still...
I have some designer friends working on 'antique' hw/sw and making a good living at it, because of speed. As I will claim ad nauseum, the main computing speed bottleneck is between the ears... your P4 or PPC970 just sits there waiting for you unless it's render time etc. Instinctive control of the interface=$peed, above and beyond many of the new 'features' of software.
So it's not just a mental breakdown they face: it's a physical/financial quandary they are looking at.
Wholehearted Agreement with the parent. Lotus Notes is shoved into our laps at work, and it's been a struggle to part out its functionality into the proper parts: Mail.app, Safari/Camino, Address Book (waiting for propr LDAP support, grr), iCal, and other 'business' tools, on my machine. [Not that I'm an Apple Software Fanatic, but they work and fit into the budget.]
L.Notes had a whole wing on the now-MIA Interface Hall of Shame. It reinvents the conventions found on other platforms (it tries to be a platform unto itself) and does so badly; it's buggy, slow, and designed for administration [decent encrypted document database scheme].
Plus, it centralizes, for better or worse, all my information on servers controlled by I.T..
Now I'd love to have a central app that takes feeds from my favourite info management apps, sorts/ranks/prioritizes/interrelates the items for me according to my usage and prefs, and lets me 'zoom in' to a task by switching to the preferred stand-alone app at will. Haystack has only part of the picture, the model is still gather-control, rather than sift-sort-go.
One item I've found intriguing is StickyBrain, a sticky-on-steriods app, by Chronos LC, which takes info in many categories and allows for quick index searching, plus offers system-wide info-archiving services and some alarm and word-processing features. I had the same kind of thing running with BBEdit, a notes directory, and grep, but it was like hammering nails with a wrench.
I want all my info hotlinked to lists of related items, dynamically: make every significant word a keyword, realtime. After all, what are multi-GHz and piles'o'RAM for, anyway, when not rendering?
[obligatory Matrix reference follows]
Where is the line between intellectual and virtual property? If we go down the road of naturalizing the virtual worlds we invent and bring them up to status with 'consensual reality', then do we risk blurring the boundaries and losing ourselves in [nearly] inconsequential realities, bequeathing care of this reality to those enamoured with power?
Funny, this feels real, but perhaps it's just another level in a simulation [albeit a very good one]. Mind you, I do see the occasional unexplainable glitch.
Piracy: a crucial part of viral marketing.
Pirates have been given a bad rap, historically. History is written by the victors, remember. Many of the pirates from the great sailing age freed slaves and the indentured, set up their own kingless mini-republics and functional anarchies, and would appear more modern to us than their other contemporaries.
See this excert from TAZ on pirate utopias or this article or google it. And of course if you're really into the spirit of things, you could goof around reading No Quarter Given.
"They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment" - D. Defoe
you'll get my old black rotary phone with the real metal bells and indestructible hard shiny plastic and nice neck-cradling handset when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
No electricity? no problem, it still works. Plus, analog has nostalgia value, too!
Maybe there's a cool mod someone's done for old phones like this so that we can convert them to VOIP...
Canada's only real threat of invasion comes from our staunchest ally, across the 'longest undefended border in the world'. During the early 90's, Fort Drum in upstate NY had urban warfare training exercises and deployable hardware that could've seen an occupation of key points in Ottawa [that's the capital of Canada for those of you who studied geography in the USA's public school system] in about 6 hours. I don't know what their deployment of forces along the border is like now, though.
And we all laugh about it, after all, they'd never invade us, right? No one would stand for it, they have no reason to...?
But it's nervous laughter. We remember "54'40" or fight!" and feel the loss of sovereignty through NAFTA and other agreements, as well as the belligerent patriotism that oozes northward with a caustic eye. Some of us are acutely aware of the years of maneuvering around access to our resources, particularly energy and the alarming megaplumbing projects aimed at flowing water south. The latest unapologetically neocolonialist activity in oil regions makes us even more nervous. Now we have a populist and realist movement to give us further liberties over our own bodies by decriminalizing personal use of cannabis and hemp production that is being squashed by the Drug Lords of the Bush Admin, and we feel more anxious about US power over us than the loss of that particular freedom.
This is something we don't talk about publicly much [a political taboo?], but it's a pretty common topic across demographics, once you get a few drinks into people.
However, I don't think that a few students studying virii indicates much about our defense priorities. CSIS, the RCMP, and the military agencies have put a fair proportion of their [relatively limited] resources into exploiting networks as a strategic zone.
The SPoD doesn't exist. I mean, I've seen something where the cursor pointing thingy all of a sudden tries to hypnotize me, but I've read all about that Borg Marketing Trojan Horsewear that tries to convince you that the colourful XP is stable fast and slickable, by taking over programs and turning the cursor pointing thingy to a hypnotist's wheel. So I immediately hit the Apple-Tab key combo to fight the dark side impulses, and the nausea-inducing spinning assault on my staunch macness just goes away!! After awhile I can switch back to my poor 'beleaguered' program and the Borg attack is gone.
There is no Pizza. It is your multitasking that must bend.
Well, coward, just to correct things, there are plenty of africanadians, especially in places where they came to get away from slavers like you.
We'll whup yer asses at lacrosse or rugby anytime, wimp. You think hockey's rough?
And, just to be on-topic, I know a couple of descendents of runaway slaves who are proud Canadian Jedi-Christians, too!
OMG. Did someone really moderate the parent 'interesting'? Recovery1 it's obvious you need to get out of Moose Jaw more often. Chinese is a common language in Richmond or Vancouver; go to other parts of Canada and you'll find other common languages. French has entrenched language rights because of RECENT history, really you should crack open that Hisory 11 textbook before you fail.
Your radio host is unlikely to be spouting facts. And since you aren't speaking Cree and wearing buckskin, don't fuss about other settlers adopting local customs. If people ask me what is typical canadian cuisine, I say puffy sweet and sour shrimp, since it's the one culinary consistency you'll find across the nation's small towns, aside from grilled cheese sandwiches.
Oh, and for now ignore cranks who complain about minority rights, Canadian society is still run with a white supremacy understanding despite all the PC rhetoric. Open your eyes, youngster!
There are, of course, scientific guidelines behind any art form, such as the Golden Ratio, but this isn't one of them. While I am open to the possibility that there may be some universals in human narrative, I shudder to think that the commodified culture of Hollywood might impose its formulas on us like a mental template. Or is it too late?
Whenever Taylorism is applied to a creative endeavour, we get quanity over quality and the fears of General Ned Ludd and the Army of Redressers as well as Socrates become valid.
Dehumanized art is dead art.
As usual, this issue is raised in a way that obscures the relationship between the commodification of life and the pure science.
We can't discuss the ethics of GM humans in anything like a civilized manner, since we can't even look accurately at the massive abuses in the patent systems, the regulatory systems, and corporate responsibility.
Let me throw out a few terms and issues that need to be discussed thoroughly before one can begin to consider the ethical rights of GM humans:
- biopiracy
- patented bloodlines
- patenting of life
- consolidation of life sciences capital resources
- the precautionary principle
- breeding |= Genetically Modified Organisms
- Monsanto's campaign of intentional GMO pollution
- emergent properties in DNA
- food sovereignty and regional food security
- the dangerous loss of biodiversity
- the dangerous loss of local knowledge
- the interpenetration of Monsanto execs and the FDA
- the attempt to squash labelling rights
- etc.
Unless you have a grasp of at least some of these issues, you can't just gripe about Foaming-at-the-Mouth Envirodweebs chanting Frankenfoods.
Look at what Monsanto is doing to Percy Schmeiser [google him], then tell me that the future of GM humans has nothing to do with present corporate practices.
Wish list item 3 (after PPC970s and 10.3) for summer fun:
An AirPort G4 tablet with 6hrs of battery life, an 11" 1024x768 screen, slim/nimble version of OS X, slot-load cdrw, 20GB/512MB/QuartzExtreme, and brushed metal everything.
Wait, scratch that: roll-out 16x9 organic touch-display, 4TB holo-storage, true voice-recog, 10GB memory sticks, gigabit wireless, fuel-cell powered uptime of 3 weeks between butane refills, and OS XII-- for under $1K.
Thanks.
Race is not much more than a way of classifying people based on appearance. It might also hint at a shared cultural background, but not always. But it is still potentially useful.
Well, for sociology nerds, it's important to remember that 'race' as a concept doesn't really exist outside of a discourse of oppressive relationships, since its historical origins as a concept were so bound up in the overdetermining of slavery as a 'natural' practice.Not that anyone who uses the term is being oppressive. You are right to some degree, that the term is often used as a way of pointing at appearance linked to geographic heritage. But that nasty history is carried along with the word and the way the institutions of the world deal with it. Yes, words like that always have complex meanings.
Anyone who examines the quagmire that is Race Politics in N.A. (which influences the discourse of race throughout the world) has to admit that oppression, repression, taboo, and resistance are not yet dissociated from the concept of race.
As the poet said, "race is a myth, but racism isn't."
The primary difference in the ease of deploying IP over A/C is with the differing electrical infrastructure in NorthAmerica as opposed to the U.K. (and possibly other regions, don't know about that). In N.A. transformers were put all over the place in such a way that it presents a significant problem for getting a clean signal all the way down the line.
The geekiest garden approach is permaculture. This is a systems and pattern-oriented approach to producing food and other agricultural products and I keep wondering why it isn't growing [*groan*] more rapidly as a philosophy.
Reasons for geekiness:
Google 'permaculture' or try here for more info.
Now there's been a fair bit of scoffed at yet strenuously researched scientific endeavour in this area, but all the successes seem to be in the snake oil category, though there are some humble curiosities like John Hutchison's work. Still, we don't understand dick about it: it doesn't really fit into the currently popular physics models, it is beyond the reach of our current instruments, and so any use of it, if it's really there, is either impossible or really dangerous.
So what's the point? We aren't ready.
Is it sophistry to say that the sun doesn't come up, but the earth spins? Depends on how serious the discussion is.
This is a serious discussion, so if you want 'bullshit' to be a general category, might as well assign it to all media, including the NY Times. There is plenty of analysis of the Times showing how they consistently use propaganda techniques to underreport or bury certain issues, like US Gov't support of [insert totalitarian regime here, plenty to choose from]. A recent example from my own experience: Rumsfeld makes a statement that's reported in the LA Times that they may consider bringing back internment camps; two days later the whole article is gone from the website, not even archived or formally withdrawn (but all the RRSP advice and local crimes articles are still there). Plenty of well documented examples out there in peer-reviewed journals if you want them.
"Bullshit" / Lies / truth are categories that don't really apply to mass media, just to some of the facts they represent. This is why news shows stopped claiming objectivity in the early '80s, and switched to claiming "balance" as what they offer.
You aren't immune from propaganda. North American society is probably the most propagandized region of the world simply by virtue of our media consumption; but, like a fish, we can't see the water. Time to get out and walk!
Umm, show me the content analysis over a 5 year period, wise guy. Let's see a little empiricism behind such allegations. There was lots of that for Pravda; should be easy to produce for al-Jazeera, eh?
Unless you have some expertise, you're just being a jingoist, thanks. Hey, I like open source, want me to set up your linux render farm? Didn't think so.
I work with media theorists, and have respect for the hard work they do. It's real work, not hocus pocus or pure ideology or the kind of 'horseshit' you're offering.
That goes for most of the second-guessing of the media I see going on here. For nerds, there's a lot of uninformed invective about a field that has lots of published research.
Thanks, that answers my freakin' question. Everyone can go home now, move along, nothing to see here, go read something informative.
MODERATORS: mod the parent up, someone's actually trying to answer my question... Likewise with other posts that try to investigate the issue with more than conjecture or invective or the obvious /.'ed snark.
Thanks.